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  • SaolDan - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Neat!
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    So... will future iterations of mainstream CPUs and motherboard provide us with more lanes for all these magical toys? Between the demands of NVMe drives, GPUs, USB Type-C, Thunderbolt, multiple SATA3/SATA-Express ports, and expansion cards, those lanes dry up very fast if you want to use a lot of them.
  • TemjinGold - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    This particular toy isn't mainstream though and won't be something the average Joe can afford.
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Obviously, but this isn't the only PCIe NVMe drive.
  • Flunk - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Z170 has a lot more PCIe 3.0 lanes (20) than previous chipsets, so Intel is at least trying.
  • The_Assimilator - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    20 really isn't enough, considering a single graphics card will consume all except 4 of those. That leaves you room for one x4 device like an M.2 drive. What we really need is 32 lanes minimum, but Intel probably won't implement that because it would cannibalise their HEDT platform.
  • extide - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Well, it's 20 lanes from the chipset, there are still 16 from the CPU, although those 20 lanes from the chipset are all ran through a single link equivalent to a PCIe 3.0 x4 link.
  • ShieTar - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    And if you need more, you just buy a Board with a PLX switch on it. The EVGA Z170 Classified 4-Way has about 70 lanes implemented if you add up all the connections available on the board. They can't all shovel data to the CPU at the same time, but that shouldn't really be a problem.

    And to be honest, if you can afford two GPUs, one or more NVMe SSDs and dozens of fast USB and SATA devices on top, a 2011-3 system should not break the bank either. And on that platform, even a relatively simple Board like the Gigabyte GA-X99-UD3 will give you 48 lanes for extension cards on top of all the M.2, Thunderbolt, USB, SATA-Express connectivity.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link

    PLX's are mostly gone from current generation boards. The company that made them was bought by an enterprise product maker who promptly jacked the prices up about 4x from $10-20 to $40-80; which has almost completely priced them out of the consumer market. At this point, you might as well just go LGA2011 for the price.
  • DarkXale - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    This device isn't exactly aimed at regular consumer machines though; its a safe assumption that anyone buying a device like this is using a E-class system. And for regular consumers - IO performance is more important than sequential performance - and that doesn't require a lot of lanes.
  • MTEK - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Anyone know which CPU/Chipset will support PCIe 4.0?
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    As of last summer the ETA for the spec to be done was early next year. That means this years Zen and Kabbylake systems almost certainly won't be getting it. Cannonlake is a maybe, but since it'll be Intel's first 10nm part they might not want to take any extra risk in ticking the PCIe controller on the CPU too.

    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326922
  • Pork@III - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    First PCI-E 4 I/O come in 300 series motherboards with support of Intel Cannonlake series processors in late 2017.
  • ikjadoon - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    They just barely ratified PCIe 3.1 in December; PCIe 4.0 (some analysts say) might be in 2017, so Zen + Kaby Lake will definitely miss it.
  • Samus - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    I wouldn't say that. I have a client with a few Z420 workstations, all equipped with a Z Turbo drive. These machines are simply for Solidworks and the resulting video rendering/editing. They just ordered two Z440's with the new Z Turbo Quad, just ridiculously fast (4GB/sec) so there is a market for this in the mainstream. These are only $2500 machines and most of the cost is the Quadro, not the PCIe SSD's. By comparison, a Macintosh Pro costs much more with SKU's up to $8,000. That, however, is obviously not mainstream. Anything under $2500 I still consider consumer/prosumer level.

    But I agree, the "need" for something like this in everyday computing simply doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean it can't be mainstream and available at MicroCenter...
  • boeush - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Well, Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake is supposedly a mild update of Skylake, so probably no luck there. Maybe the 10 nm Cannonlake, which is at least a year and a half away? Doubtful, as it's mostly just a die shrink of Skylake rather than a new architecture. So maybe the fabled Ice Lake, the next 'Tock' - and probably due no sooner than mid-2018 (optimistically speaking)...

    Meanwhile, AMD is about to unleash it's Zen - a design that's by now a couple of years old - and unlikely to have anticipated the PCIe lane crunch. As to whether AMD will survive long enough to produce Zen's successor, is at this point an open question...
  • extide - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Don't forget we got PCIe 3.0 on Ivy Bridge, which was "just a shrink" of Sandy. So Cannonlake is not out of the question.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    The rumor mill says Intel's 200 series chipsets will be getting another 4 high speed IO lanes, and since the max supported number of USB3 and Sata6 ports isn't changing it's clear the intent is to add more PCIe capacity. OTOH the chipset's still limied to grouping in a max of x4 (because that's all it has to the CPU). It's possible we might see more CPU lanes with Ice Lake (next new architecture); but since the overwelming majority of their customers won't have a dGPU 16 CPU lanes are probably still good enough for mainstream parts; and if that pushes more enthusiasts to LGA2011 products instead of LGA115x, from Intel's standpoint that's a good thing.
  • boeush - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link

    Of course, by Ice Lake (mid- to late-2018? early 2019?) we should have PCIe4 in wide adoption. If typical I/O device bandwidth capability doesn't double by then, the extra PCIe bandwidth could be used to stuff more devices in over the same number of lanes (so, e.g. putting a device on a x2 link where before it would have needed a x4.)

    And not to nitpick, but LGA2011 would be somewhat long in the tooth by then (and likely replaced with something else) - but your point regarding premium/enterprise vs consumer chipsets remains valid.
  • deadlockedworld - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    But it is from Seagate, so I automatically assume it will break after 1.5 years.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    If not DOA
  • Notmyusualid - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    I've had a DOA SSD from Intel, believe it or not.

    I didn't get mad, things do get damaged in transit from time to time.

    I had a replacement by the end of the week. That 160GB G1 is going strong to this day.
  • MrSpadge - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link

    You seem to be new to the internet. If you had a hardware failure you're expected to rant about that and to swear how you'll never buy from that company again, and advise anyone else to follow your example.
  • The_Assimilator - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    "Seagate does have an internal development team with SandForce, but it's highly unlikely they've been able to develop such a large controller so soon."

    SandForce hasn't been able to develop ANY controllers since before Seagate bought them, it seems...
  • extide - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Yeah and the ones they are coming out with a already out of date!
  • iamkyle - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    Maybe they can put 4x2281 controllers in a RAID 0 array of just controllers...then logically attach that array to some decent flash memory and BAM! Why innovate when you can just expand?
  • Brazos - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    I'm looking forward to the future when units like this are mainstream and chipsets have large number of lanes. Exciting times. Lets look back in 3 or 4 years and see what's developed.
  • LordConrad - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    "...but there are already multi-drive products on the market offering RAID0 speeds well in excess of 6GB/s."

    This is an enterprise product. No one would ever use drives in RAID 0, unless it was strictly temporary storage such as movie making/editing.
  • poningru - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    fyi looks like only the x8 has the pci-e switch and what causes the slow down. The x16 piece does not have a pci-e switch. please see picture: http://imgur.com/X1Ttu36
    You can clearly see they are just routing the pcb directly from pcie to the 4 individual controllers.
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link

    Thanks for pointing that out. I suppose I should have said that a PCIe switch is required for maximum compatibility. A PCIe x16 slot can't necessarily operate as four separate x4 links; Intel's consumer CPUs and Xeon E3s can split things down to x8+x4+x4 but I think the other Xeon product lines can always split down to blocks of four lanes.

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